Posted by:
Brother Of Jerry
(
)
Date: July 31, 2018 10:32PM
Back in the day I used to live in SL County and worked in Utah County. Geneva Steel was still around, and it was often the case that as I came over Point of the Mountain, there was a distinct visible cloud of dirty air surrounding Geneva. Funny thing was, once I drove inside the cloud, it was no longer visible, except for a sense that the air seemed a bit hazy.
Things are often more obvious when viewed from the outside.
With that in mind, I recently read an essay from a recovering Catholic, and his experience, while in many ways different from the exMo experience, has some remarkable parallels too. Here's the link. If you've already hit the NYTimes paywall, I'll include a few of what I think are the best quotes.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/21/opinion/sunday/how-i-made-it-back-to-church.html"I hadn’t been to church in five Beyoncé albums." Great opening line.
"I describe myself as a recovering Catholic, but when a more pointed question such as “So what do you believe in?” surfaces, I don’t know how to answer.
As a child, I knew what to say, thanks to a religious-indoctrination diet of Bible-themed cartoons, saint-themed trading cards and required attendance at mass. As an adult, I still think Jesus seems like a swell fellow, but I feel out of step with most Christian churches. My talking points aren’t what they used to be."
Me: Yeah, my talking points aren't what they used to be either. Ands why don't we have GA trading cards? "Hey Jimmy, I'll trade you two Eyrings and a Jowls for an Uchdorf."
"For years, my mother had been encouraging me to go back to church. The most opportune times for her to push her agenda were whenever I felt my lowest. I liked my methods of coping better: Mary J. Blige albums and maybe another prescription for a generic form of Celexa."
Me: so it's not just Mormon mothers.
Author reporting on recently attending a neighborhood Baptist church: "In church that day, everyone seemed to be welcomed and behaved as such. In the front row, which was reserved for pastors of the church, I saw a sea of women. Women were typically marginalized out of leadership roles in the church. In Catholicism, no such roles even existed. But on that day in that church, there were more female pastors than male pastors."
Me: No such roles even existed. We know about that. It is the one big thing we have in common with the Catholic Church.
"Months later, someone I went to catechism with at Saint Mark the Evangelist, the church I attended regularly as a child, got in touch with me on Facebook. She had watched an interview in which I described myself as a “recovering Catholic.”
She told me that I had her in tears. “I had no idea you felt that way about being Catholic,” she wrote. “It really hurt to hear you say you were recovering from it.” She described the church as a big family, saying that we all had different opinions yet loved one another. And that the church we both grew up in was different now. That it was welcoming and that she could actually “see and feel the love.”
Unfortunately, her telling me this story did not make me want to come back to the Catholic church or any church. All she did was remind me of what had kept me away for so long. It took me a long time to unlearn every damaging thing I’ve seen and heard about my identity. I was in no rush to fall back into old habits."
Me: Yep, been there, done that too.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/31/2018 10:35PM by Brother Of Jerry.